Archives for November 2017

Well, the most anticipated album of the year, Taylor Swift’s Reputation, has finally been released. The followup to her world-conquering, Grammy-winning smash hit 1989, the album comes after a two-year hiatus in which curiosity about this megastar’s next release reached an absolutely fevered pitch even from those who didn’t like her music. Despite this, the album has proven bitterly divisive even among her fans, but judging from the album itself, I imagine that was exactly what Swift was going for.

Let me explain. Swift, whatever her detractors may say about her, is exceptionally smart, and she knew that almost anything she released after 1989 was going to feel like a letdown (look at what happened with Adele’s 25, for example). She was smart enough to know that the only way to win that game was not to play…to play a different game instead, and do something that absolutely no-one was expecting. To this end, she released a difficult, complex, almost avant-garde album, and the fact that it is currently failing to match the Pop success of 1989 is a reflection on its intentions rather than its quality. To use an analogy from the greatest Pop musicians from another era, 1989 was her Sgt. Pepper, and now Reputation is her White Album.

If that makes this album seem like a calculated commercial move, then I apologize for giving that impression, because that’s the last way anyone would describe this album. The music is a mix of harsh, discordant, even deliberately ugly sounds and blissful lyricism, but the dark undertones are ever-present, even on the most ebullient love songs like “Gorgeous” (‘Ocean blue eyes/gaze into mine/I think I just might/sink and drown and die’). “…Ready For It”, the opening track, does a fine job of telling the audience what they’re in for, with a dissonant, taunting verse and a chorus that is pure Pop bliss.

The album’s lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do”, while it was an extremely effective way to roll out Swift’s new persona, seems to have led many people to expect a darker album than the one we actually got. A terrifying mix of eerie piano, pounding Hip-Hop beats and hissing whispers, it is easily the scariest of all Swift’s ‘angry’ songs. It was also the first song of her entire career to really embrace the influence of Hip-Hop, even including a bizarre but oddly effective sample of the chorus from Right Said Fred’s Nineties novelty hit “I’m Too Sexy” (the repeated “Look what you made me do” on this song’s chorus is set to the same rhythm, and it manages to make it sound terrifying).

The other really extreme examples of Swift’s ‘new sound’ are “I Did Something Bad” and “Endgame”. The former takes a warping, discordant chorus that could have come out of a mid-2000s Britney Spears song, and surrounds it with intelligently-written verses and lyrics that actually give it a valid dramatic function. The latter is a flat-out Rap song, featuring guests spots by her frequent collaborator Ed Sheeran but also by Pop-Rap superstar Future. This is Swift’s first serious attempt at genuine Rap (her duet with T-Pain, “Thug Story”, doesn’t really count, as it was intended as a parody), and as much of a shock as it must have been to many of her fans, she proves to be surprisingly adroit at it. But most of the rest of the album is simply blissful, melodic love songs with tinges of darkness under the surface, recognizably different from her earlier work but not to the degree that many expected when they heard the first singles.

The album’s sound is largely built on the best and most ambitious song from 1989, “Out of the Woods”. The bulk of this album uses the same mix of sorrowful lyricism and creative dissonance that made that song so unique, only here the sounds are much more chaotic and discordant than they were on the earlier song. This makes sense, as this entire album is built on chaotic and discordant emotions…1989 was an album about clarity and self-acceptance, while this is an album about paranoia and vulnerability.

This also explains why, while 1989 told a clearly-plotted linear story, the songs and situations here come out in seemingly random order like a burst of jumbled-up inner thoughts…which is exactly what they’re supposed to be. Still, the growth she showed on 1989 is continued here…she still acknowledges her own neuroses, and she still shows willingness to paint herself in an unflattering light in places.

She seems to focus mostly on her most recent relationship and the solace it has provided her during her lengthy public mistreatment by the media, and that mistreatment itself, with several songs particularly targeted at her professional archfoes Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. In addition to “Look What You Made Me Do” and “I Did Something Bad”, there’s also the witheringly sarcastic “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”. The latter song isn’t as biting as some of Swift’s earlier lyrical takedowns of her enemies, but it’s easily the funniest of them since “Better Than Revenge” back in 2010.

The high point of the album is the sublimely beautiful final song, “New Year’s Day”, which could give “Out of the Woods” some serious competition as the best song of her career. As I said, this album has proved bitterly divisive among both critics and fans, but I’m fairly certain Swift was expecting that when she released it. Given her relative stability and level-headedness for a Pop star, I imagine this is the closest thing to John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band or Michael Jackson’s HIStory that Swift will ever release…that this is her version of the proverbial ‘nervous breakdown’ album.

And it seems to be exactly the kind of album that’s going to need a few years to settle down into the status of an established classic, but I can say with a fair degree of certainty that it’ll get there eventually…albums of this sort generally do, if they’re of this level of quality, and Reputation wouldn’t be the first great album to take a few years to be fully appreciated. Hell, if Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music can be acknowledged as a classic after the fact, then I imagine this album won’t have too much trouble winning people over with a few repeat listens. Just give it time.

Earlier this year, Katy Perry released a disastrous album entitled Witness. The album actually featured some interesting lyrics, but apart from the lead single “Chained to the Rhythm”, there was hardly a tune on the whole thing. It was as if Katy Perry was trying to be Courtney Barnett, and in addition to the fact that no-one wanted to see her do that, the lyrics weren’t that good…certainly not good enough to carry the album on their own. But my preference, when an established artist who was once good releases a terrible album, is to explore something from their glory days to remind people that they are indeed capable of good work. After all, everyone has weighed in on Witness‘ failure…I, on the other hand, would like to take you back to 2010, and the release of Katy Perry’s one masterpiece album, the monumental Pop smash hit Teenage Dream.

Anyone who thought Disco was dead in 2010 evidently wasn’t listening to the radio, as this album is unmistakably a Disco album. It doesn’t sound like Retro-Pop…its sound is immaculately modern (or at least was when it was released in 2010), but virtually every song is built on a Disco beat. The highlights are the title track, a beautifully constructed, glowing Pop love ballad, and “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.), the party song to end all party songs. Granted, the party jams of the early 2010s Club Boom were not exactly the best trend ever to hit Pop music, but still, being the definitive example of a genre that pervasive has to count for something.

The other singles were less well-received at the time, being widespread targets of mockery by various pop-culture satirists, but most of them have held up surprisingly well today. Granted, “California Gurls” leaves much to be desired in the lyrical department (both the main body of the song and the rap verse), but the superb production and insanely catchy melody make it nonetheless irresistible, and while legendary Rapper Snoop Dogg is clearly phoning in his guest verse in both lyrics and performance, his charisma still gives the song at least a faint touch of class.

“Firework” is one of the cheesiest of the long string of self-esteem anthems to come out of this era, but thanks to its explosive chorus and the way Perry throws herself into her performance, the overall result is actually kind of thrilling. Moreover, despite the sometimes clumsy analogies in the lyrics, it still comes across as genuinely sincere and warm-hearted…Perry genuinely seems to want to provide comfort to people, coming across as far more sympathetic than she had seemed on her more self-involved previous material. Indeed, it may have been the first of the self-esteem anthems of 2011/2012 to be released…remember that long before it became a single, it was already included on the album as far back as August of 2010, whereas most of its peers came from albums that were released in 2011 or later.

“E.T.” had a particularly large faction of detractors when it was released, but I blame most of that on the Kanye West rap verse added to the single. West is admittedly a better producer than rapper, but on his own albums he’s usually a reasonably competent lyricist (or was when this song was released, anyway). However, he seems to be absolutely terrible at improvising (an important skill for a widespread purveyor of guest verses), so he tends to make an ass of himself on most of his guest appearances, and this was a particularly severe case. But heard on the album, without West’s dubious contribution, the song is actually rather striking and arrestingly strange, with its cryptic, ambiguous subject matter and discordant but oddly hypnotic beat. Also, the complex, amorphous melody suits Perry’s voice as much as anything she’s ever sung, turning her tuneless moaning into an asset in a way that seems to foreshadow the success of acts like Future.

The final single from the main album, “The One That Got Away”, received a lukewarm reception even from most of Perry’s fans at the time, with many accusing it of being ‘boring’ and ‘dreary’. While it’s true that it lacks the camp appeal and uptempo excitement of her earlier singles, and that Taylor Swift was doing the same kind of thing much better at the time, this is still a perfectly respectable and even rather touching attempt at a bittersweet love song. The acoustic version included as a bonus track on the album’s rerelease, while it does not flatter Perry’s vocals, does do an impressive job of highlighting the emotional honesty of the song, and indeed is more interesting than the original recording…even Perry’s vocal strains and cracks fit rather well with the song’s emotional content.

Perry has a widespread reputation for excessive use of album filler, but at least in this album’s case, that reputation isn’t entirely deserved. Admittedly, there are two absolutely awful songs on this album…the gratuitously unpleasant “Circle the Drain” and “Peacock”, which may very well be the stupidest song ever written. The latter achieved a sort of meme status, and as a result actually managed to get played on the radio, despite the fact that its “double-entendres” are so blunt that it actually winds up repeatedly saying the word it’s supposed to be merely alluding to (“cock”, for any of you who hadn’t already figured that out). It only barely cracked the Hot 100 and never made it anywhere near the Top Forty, but it was a Number One hit on the Club Dance Charts, otherwise known as the musical kingdom of the damned.

However, the other album tracks were perfectly valid and, in many cases, excellent. The heartbreaking ballad “Not Like the Movies” is probably Perry’s best attempt at a “serious” song to date, and the joyful “Hummingbird Heartbeat” could easily have held its own as one of the singles. But the most notable album track of all is the most obscure, “Who Am I Living For?”. It was never a single, not even a promotional single, never got performed on the Grammys like “Not Like the Movies”, never got any exposure whatsoever outside of the album, but it is, hands-down, the best song Katy Perry has ever recorded. I’m not joking, either…a heartfelt song about spiritual searching set to music that sounds like the theme to a superhero movie, it is easily the most distinguished track of her entire career.

Granted, as is often the case with even good Pop albums, the bonus tracks don’t measure up to the rest of the album. The best of them, the atmospheric ballad “Wide Awake”, is genuinely pretty in an otherworldly sort of way, rather like a more conventionally euphonious version of “E.T.”, and could have held its own with the original album tracks. But “Part of Me”, another self-esteem anthem, is uninspired and obnoxiously belligerent, with none of the stirring melody or inspirational warmth of “Firework”, and the idiotic “Dressin’ Up” is only marginally less embarrassing than “Peacock”.

There’s a reason Perry isn’t usually thought of as an “album artist”…her other albums have admittedly not held up especially well. Her first release, One of the Boys, featured mostly decent songs (at least apart from “Ur So Gay” and the title track), but Perry herself sounded absolutely awful on it…her producers were clearly still figuring out how to doctor her voice into something listenable at that point. As for her follow-up to Teenage Dream, Prism, it was only marginally better than Witness, with its only really outstanding song, “Roar”, being a blatant rip-off of Sara Bareilles’ “Brave”. But this album, in spite of a few duds and the uninspired bonus tracks, actually holds up an an overall ‘album’ experience, and indeed ranks with the great Pop albums of the 2010s. And long after all her late-career failures are forgotten, Teenage Dream will give Perry her longterm legacy…after all, “California Gurls”, “Firework”, “Last Friday Night”, and the title track are still radio staples to this day, and seem likely to stay that way for years to come.